The Monster Man of Horror House (11 page)

And
this was what saved my life.

*

“Coal, get up, now!” Freddy barked as he shook me from my slumber.

I’d
only gone off duty four hours earlier and still had the blur of booze in my
eyes, so he slapped me across the face and tipped me from my bunk.

“Up!”
he ordered.

“What?
What is it? Are we sinking?” I asked, this being the one stock question I'd
kept asking since joining the crew, betraying the level of confidence I had in
my new home.

“No
we’re not fucking sinking; the Captain’s calling general quarters, we’re to
report to the Boatswain, let’s go!” he growled, dragging me out and along the
gangway as I was still pulling my boots on.

The
night was black and blustery and when we got up top I saw why we were rocking
so much.

“We’ve
stopped,” I said, looking out across the chop. Freddy didn’t reply, he was
already a couple of pages in front of me and continued kicking me up the
backside until we found the Boatswain surrounded by half a dozen others.

“Boatswain,
what gives?” we asked. The Boatswain just nodded out to sea and we followed his
eyes until it led us smack bang into another vessel rocking out there in the
blackness barely two hundred yards away.

“We
almost steamed right over her,” the Boatswain spat, releasing a brown globule
of chaw to the winds. “Cocksuckers!”

The
Boatswain was a Nigerian but he was working hard at being American. He planned
to go there one day, when he had enough money, marry himself a couple of white
women and find out how dry cleaning worked. This was his dream. But the
Boatswain would never realise his dream. Like the rest of us he was doomed to spend
the rest of his life empting his pockets around the ports of the East Sea and hanging
socks in the motor room to test his various theories.

“Who
is she?” I asked, but the Boatswain just shrugged. Who she was was less
important than what she was doing. Smaller than us, possibly half the size of
the
Folly
, she bobbed up and down
like Davey Jones’ dinner table and invited us to come dine with her.

The
Captain blew our steam whistle up on the bridge but nothing stirred on the
other ship. Not so much as a light burned on her bow. She just bobbed in the blackness,
oblivious to the sea, the squall and us.

“She’s
a ghost ship,” Sushanta commented, before pointing out the obvious. “This is a
bad omen.” Sushanta liked to think of himself as our shaman, a wise man on a
ship of the fallen, but Sushanta was prone to the odd tumble himself, as the
madams of Macau and Manila could readily testify.

“It’s
a terrible fucking omen for her crew,” Freddy agreed, “but pay day for us.”

The
Boatswain was less than eager and had seen this sort of thing before. “Pirates;
they lure poor greedy fools aboard, skin them alive and take their ships. We
have to be careful,” he said, pissing out Freddy’s birthday cake in the process.

The
Captain now addressed the abandoned ship through the loud hailer: “
Sumatran Wind
, this is the
SS Almayer’s Folly
. We are a registered
merchant vessel out of Colombo. Do you hear me? Do you need assistance, over?”

Nothing.

“
Sumatran Wind,
is there anyone on board?
We have medical supplies and food and water. Is anyone there?”

Still
nothing.

The
Boatswain looked up towards the bridge and the Captain gave the signal he was
expecting – if not welcoming. The Boatswain frowned.

“Okay
boys, steel up.”

We
followed him down to the Radio Room and watched him knock the lock off a large
trunk he found there to hand out Lee-Enfied rifles. The others had clearly
handled guns before but when he handed me mine, I underestimated how heavy it
was and dropped it on the Boatswain’s boots. The Boatswain pursed his lips, took
the rifle back from me and dug into the trunk again.

“Here,”
he said, handing me a flat-bladed cane knife as a consolation prize. “Maybe you
take this instead.” As lethal as my machete looked, it would only take a five
yard head-start, a step ladder or, say, a Lee-Enfield rifle to get the better
of me, which is a sobering thought when you’re going up against skin-flaying
pirates, so I asked the Boatswain if there was anything else I could have;
something I could use from a distance that didn’t require any sort of skill.
The Boatswain thought for a moment, took the flat-bladed cane knife back from
me and handed me a medical kit instead. “You’re the orderly now,” he told me.

I
decided to keep my mouth shut in case my medical kit became a pencil and paper
and I was further demoted to campaign correspondent. Instead I quickly rummaged
through it for scalpels or big safety pins with which to fight off pirates and followed
the rest of the boarding party back up top.

Sushanta
reassured me it would be all right as he locked home a
.303
to stoke me with confidence. He may have advertised himself as
some kind of spiritualist but he still had a soapy side to himself just like
the rest of us. Tattoos up and down each arm told his story, but I couldn’t
read them as they were in Hindi, so I asked him what they meant and he’d told
me they were the names of the prisons he’d done time in. Several prisons bore
stars next to their listings. These, Sushanta smiled, were prisons he was yet
to be released from.

We
clambered over the side and into a waiting launch, stowing ourselves against
the sides as we were winched down to the waves. If I thought the sea was rough while
I’d been on board a 6,000 ton steamer, this was nothing compared to the hayride
awaiting us over the side.

“Hold
onto you brem boys, it’s going to be a bumpy ride,” H cackled, striking the
motor and churning us out into the brine. H was a Burmese opium smoker with an
unpronounceable name, so everyone simply called him H. At least, his name was
unpronounceable in the sense that nobody had ever bothered trying to pronounce
it. I’m sure if we’d all put our minds to it and spent five minutes with him
each day learning the shape of his consonants we could’ve mastered his name
within a week, but where was the incentive when he already looked up at “H”?
Besides, five minutes was a long time in H’s company. Believe me.

Most
of the crew only answered to nicknames or ranks. I myself was known only as
Coal. It wasn’t the greatest nickname in the world, but it never failed to
crack up some of my more cosmopolitan crewmates that someone as white as me was
called Coal. They might’ve had a different opinion if they’d looked over now
because my frosty complexion had turned a vomit green, as huge great waves came
in from all sides to lift us to the clouds and then drop us back into their hollows
again.

Freddy
grinned like he was riding the loop-the-loop on Blackpool beach and whooped
with excitement each time we were thrust towards the heavens until eventually
we reached the other vessel. H took us in, hitching rides on the waves that
were rocking the
Wind
until we were
in sync and close enough to attach our magnets. The Boatswain, Sushanta and Freddy
then threw grappling hooks up her side and quickly clambered up the ropes.

Singh
went next, along with Najib and Lumpati, and then finally me. H stayed with the
launch to safeguard our way home while the rest of our shipmates hung
Lee-Enfield’s over the side of the
Folly
a couple of hundred yards away to cover any possible retreat.

Lumpati
and Singh pulled me up the last few feet then set off after the others before
I’d got my bearings.

The
Sumatran Wind
was grey and full of
shadows. It moaned beneath the barracking of the sea and lay in wait to swallow
us up lest we forget to watch where we steppted. I clicked my torch on and
scoured the decks. There was debris and flotsam rolling between the hatches but
no signs of life. Something had happened here.

“Look
at this,” Sushanta said, shining his torch around the bridge hatch.

We
gathered around and saw that a big lump had been knocked through one side of
the door and scorch marks charred the surrounding frame.

“Someone
fired a distress flare at it,” the Boatswain said, and we were fairly happy
with this explanation until Sushanta pointing out that they’d fired it from inside.

“Maybe
they were drunk,” Freddy speculated. I wished I was, especially when Rupak Singh
suggested we split up and explored the boat in pairs. As you can guess, there
was an almighty clamour not to be the one paired off with the skinny white kid
with the plasters, but eventually Sushanta relented and agreed to walk me
around the ship.

The
Boatswain sent us in the direction of the cargo hold and Sushanta led the way,
stock to shoulder and finger to trigger. I kicked the square hatch off the
cargo port and shone my torch in to see only bales and boxes. But Sushanta was
sharper than me and what he saw confused him.

“Nothing’s
stowed as it should be. Those crates should be tethered as one, but they are
stacked in lines. It doesn’t make sense.”

I
agreed and suggested we discussed this at length back on the
Folly
, but Sushanta was not only sharper
than me, he also more courageous and he slid over the side and down the
nettings until he was standing in front of a wall of crates.

“Come
down here. Now!”

I
swallowed my fears and bemoaned the fact that I could be killing prostitutes
with my dad right now instead of exploring ghost ships as I climbed down to
join Sushanta.

“Be
careful where you step. Don’t touch anything,” he advised. We followed the
twisting maze of crates and bales around until we encountered the remains of a
barrier. It looked as though this barrier had been stacked and shored up from
behind with the heaviest crates, but something had dismantled them with ease.

Dismantled
them to smithereens.

“Blood,”
Sushanta muttered, bending over to dab his fingers in a couple of dark spots
between the wreckage. Much to my dismay I was able to trump Sushanta with an
enormous Jackson Pollock across the back wall, together with an assortment of
hair and clothing dumped in a sticky heap by the base of the barricade.

“Oh
Jesus!” I retched, but I’d already lost all I’d had to lose in the launch ride
over here.

Amongst
the blood and bones were a string of pink sausages, or at least, this is what
they looked like.

“Intestines,”
Sushanta said. “Bowls and shit. It didn’t like these parts.”

“What
didn’t?”

“Whatever
ripped through this boat.”

Sushanta
raised his rifle to each of the shadows around us and I followed his aim with
my torchlight but all we found were more splatters and sausages.

“We’re
beyond bad omens here,” I said.

“Let’s
get the hell out of here,” Sushanta agreed, though he had to say it a couple of
times because I could scarcely hear him from the top of the netting as I
scrambled back up to the deck.

The
Boatswain and Freddy met us up top with similar stories of carnage and all
thoughts of salvage went out of the window as we elected to take the launch
back to the
Folly
.

“Wait,”
Singh urged. “There’s more.”

Yep,
as if the horrors we’d found weren’t enough to get us taking pot shots at
passing albatrosses already, Singh marked our cards by taking down to the
crew’s quarters.

“It’s
wired to explode.”

“Explode?”
Freddy baulked, backing off a couple of steps as if he wanted to live or
something.

“There’s
enough dynamite behind this hatch to take her to the bottom,” Singh confirmed,
cracking open the hatchway to show us a crude spider’s web of blue and brown
wires that ran to a charge fixed to the side of the
Wind
’s hull.

“We
left this style of welcome for the Japanese when we bugged out of Rangoon,”
Singh explained. “But this is a crude effort. No attempt to hide it. Strange.”

“Maybe
there are more; better concealed?” the Boatswain speculated and sure enough we
found another wire linked to a second set of charges strung across the
stairwell to the engine room. Actually, we didn’t spot it: Lumpati – bless
his cotton socks – blundered straight into it, surely dooming the lot of
us. But the crew of the
Wind
weren’t
as adept as rigging booby-traps as Singh had been back in ’42, because the
chest-height tripwire held fast and simply flicked Lumpati onto his back.

“These
guys don’t know shit about sabotage,” Singh concluded, examining the trip-pins
which were driven into solid oak beams next to the charges by a whole inch,
making them near impossible to pull out with our bare hands.

“Maybe
not. Maybe these bombs weren’t meant for men,” Sushanta said. “Something else
drove the crew to this. Or what remained of them.”

“There’s
nothing here but death,” the Boatswain concluded. “Let’s go back before we
become a part of this voyage.” He and Sushanta blew their whistles, summoning everyone
back up top and to my immense relief I found we had as many crewmates as when we’d
started. Only Singh lingered, searching the stores for rope and joining us five
minutes later when we were all hoarse from calling his name.